Category Archives: Volume 9, no. 2 (2014)

Welcome to today’s colloquium at the University of Akureyri, a seminar to honor our dear friend Mikael Karlsson, now a Professor emeritus at the University of Iceland. Mike turned seventy years old on the 26th of March this year.

There are two major shortcomings in current psychotherapy outcome research: The standards that are used to evaluate psychotherapy (especially the way control conditions are set up in outcome research) are often not acceptable, and non-specific factors have been largely neglected, in part because of the “psychological placebo” metaphor. I argue that theories of psychotherapy need to specify further the role of non-specific factors in the development and maintenance of different disorders, and how non-specific treatment factors can be made to be more effective in therapy. This may be the major front in the future of psychotherapy research.

The range or scope of [moral] action is the range or scope of deliberate action. A deliberate action is chosen. Some choices are, for various reasons, considerably more important than others – most will agree that the decision whether or not to get married is more important than whether or not or where to go on holiday – but no choice is outside the moral realm, and no choice, as Aristotle already made clear, is made in the abstract. All actual choices are made in the prevailing circumstances as they are understood by the person choosing. There are no abstract and no non-moral choices.

The thesis from which this comparison proceeds is that the major differences between the East-Asian and Western ethical traditions emanate from divergent views of the kind of role selfhood or ego should play in social human life. A comparison of these views, it is suggested, will be helpful to flesh out the different perceptions of morality. It will be proposed that Western thinking is characterized by a stronger focus on the self, and that while Western ethical thinkers and schools certainly seek to reduce self-centeredness, such endeavours generally proceed through an augmentation of the role of human reason and thus a more intense and even tormenting self-consciousness. A clear reflection of this tendency is the ethical approach to moral issues qua issues associated with individual action and rational choice. The East-Asian approach differs from this in that it seeks to balance excessive introspection with a cultivated ‘sense’ of identification with the whole, be it society or the natural realm. While this approach, it seems, largely succeeds in preventing an existential kind of agony, it nevertheless suffers from some other serious weaknessess. Hence both traditions, it is argued, have something to offer one other. The discussion offered here is merely a sketchy outline that may hopefully work as a first step toward that purpose.

Despite his enduring fame as a scientist and a thinker, Blaise Pascal’s moral philosophy has received very little attention by modern Anglophone ethicists, who have written instead endless volumes on the epistemology of his wager—itself a piece of apologetics and an early example of game theory. They have labelled Pascal a ‘philosopher of religion’ and pretty much left him there, as marginal as religion itself seems to be these days. Yet, Pascal did have a moral philosophy of his own and one that can help us answer the question ‘what is morality?’ from the perspective of lived personal experience. It is not an easy one to detect, for it is scattered across his unsystematic maxims, short reflections and aphorisms, themselves scattered across a number of differing manuscripts. Reconstructing and outlining it is the chief aim of my paper.

John Dewey famously argued that we should think of democracy as a “way of life”. What this consists in he described as participating according to capacity in public decisions and participating according to need or desire in forming values. He also characterized democracy as “a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” (Dewey 1966 p. 87; 1954 p. 147; 1957 p. 209). Such and other passages in Dewey’s works show that his conception of democracy is complex. He did not think of it simply as a way of decision-making, nor is democratic procedure of particular importance to him. Concepts such as “associated living” or “communicated experience” point to the social dimensions Dewey was particularly interested in. Dewey also repeatedly claims that democracy demands “social return” from every individual and that democracy enables everyone to develop “distinct capacities” (Dewey 1966, p. 122). A related claim emphasizes how, in a democracy, “all share in useful service and enjoy a worthy leisure” (Dewey 1966, p. 256).

The UN endorsed the principle of the Responsibility to Protect in 2005. This has proved controversial partly because it includes, where all else fails, military intervention to try to stop certain classes of human rights violation. I welcome the move to R2P as representing a ‘cosmopolitan turn’ in understanding the UN, but doubt whether military intervention is the right way to discharge our cosmopolitan responsibilities to protect. My three reasons – that it is counterproductive, that it unjustifiably privileges the preventing of the deliberate violation of human rights by other agents over the promotion of human rights and protecting human rights in the face of suffering caused by natural causes or the impacts of human institutions, and that it goes against the principle ‘the means are ends in the making’ – all reflect particular a ways in which ethics, particularly in its global dimension, should be understood. This paper explores via the example of R2P some of these ‘higher order’ or ‘meta’ issues in ethics about the nature of consequences, the implications of rights and the relationship between means and ends.[1]

In this short paper I will try to explain some thoughts concerning what I take to be the basic aspect of morality, namely justice. These thoughts are expressed in the subtitle of my paper where I put Icelandic words in bracket (this paper was originally planned to be in Icelandic). These three words refer to the main aspects of the concept of justice when we apply it to what I believe to be the three basic dimensions of human society, namely the spiritual or cultural, the political or public, and the economic or technical dimension.

In this paper I employ Goodenough´s distinction between films that illustrate, are about and do philosophy to answer the question how we can identify the ethical content of movies. Crimes and Misdemeanors by Woody Allen is taken as an example but Mary L. Litch has argued that this movie illustrates ethical problems and is about ethics. On Litch´s reading the film reveals inherent flaws in utilitarianism and illustrates a Kantian insight as well as other ethical and religious theses. I argue, however, that Litch has relied on a too narrow method when identifying the ethics of Crimes and Misdemeanors. She focuses almost exclusively on dialogue and the general storyline. If we broaden our method to include sensitivity to filming, editing, camera angulation etc., we will not only realize a rather different ethical content in Crimes and Misdemeanors but also see how the movie stirkes close to home for most viewers of Hollywood movies.

Mikael M. Karlsson, Professor of philosophy at the University of Iceland, has left a deep mark in the history of philosophy in Iceland as well as the history of the University of Akureyri. As a teacher of philosophy, he has for 40 years opened new paths for his students, both in thought and action. As a scholar, he has written a good number of outstanding works that are systematically connected. As an academic citizen, he has been active in establishing international relations, and he was an effective pioneer and leader as the first Dean of the Faculty of law and social sciences at the University of Akureyri. In that role, he laid the foundation for a vibrant academic community with an international flavor.